10 Questions About…

We have always enjoyed Belfast. Last time we were here in the dead of winter and saw a lot of the political side of Belfast. We toured the murals and politically charged neighborhoods. This time around we didn’t do any of that. What’s funny is that if this were our first visit to Belfast the girls would not know that such a side existed. It was strange to see how easily that could happen – strange in a good way I suppose. The short of it is we saw a very different city this time around.

Patrick did not spend the day with us. He rushed off to do research. In fact he left in a big scurry claiming that he couldn’t waste any time, leaving me to worry about checking out, bags, not having money and getting plans for the day. Turns out though he did have time for the 40 minute walk to the library. Humpf. We’re calling him Mr Importantpants after that.

So the rest of us started out our day with the Titanic Boat Tour. We took an actual boat tour of Lagan River, which runs through Belfast. We saw where the Titanic was built and learned all about it. The last thing we did in St Paul before they left was visit the Titanic exhibit at the Minnesota Science Museum. I thought we’d probably make it to Belfast and everything would click more if we did both in the summer. I was amazed at how much Lily soaked up from the tour.

We learned that there were 3 boats related to the Titanic. The Olympia sailed before Titanic. It got a lot more press. So much so that often after the Titanic sank they often took pictures of the Olympia and just photo-shopped in the Titanic name. Some of the bad calls on the part of the Titanic: they iniitally had enough left boats for everyone but the owner thought that they obscured the view for the first class passengers and had half removed. They also saved money by not getting the lookout people binoculars. The Titanic actually was weeks behind schedule and should have sailed much earlier in the year when the ice would not have been so far south. We also learned that air-conditioning was invested in Belfast – along with a whole lot of other things.

After the boat we had a quick lunch. I had potato skins – which I have to say is an unusual choice for me – but it was clearly God speaking to me. It was chips of potato peels topped with bacon and melted cheese. Health on a plate. Mmmm.

We serendipitously ended up walking through the shopping district. I was really impressed with the pedestrian area in Belfast. First, it’s huge. Second, they have really nice shops. I didn’t get a very good picture but the Victoria Square Shopping Center is very cool with its glass domed ceiling/roof.

Then we headed to Belfast Castle, which was a little further out than I thought. (Correction it cost more than I planned to get there by taxi. Money wasn’t as much an issue as currency but if you don’t have the readies, that kind of distinction is academic.) There was an “adventure playground” that the girls told me was very OK. The gardens around the Castle were beautiful. And it is an amazing view of Belfast.

Our plan had been to take a taxi back to the city – but one never passed so we took a bus in from Belfast Castle. It’s always fun to get a glimpse of a city that way. The homes near the castle were beautiful. I’ll just say that the homes became more lived in the closer we got to town.

Eventually we got back, we got dinner and we got on a bus back to Dublin. (In fact I’m typing this up as we ride.)

We’ll get home just in time for my midnight conference call. The time difference doesn’t work so much against me – but I’ll be talking to new blogger so that’s always fun.

The best laid plan… We planned to go to Belfast on the train at 11:00. The girls and I made it to the station on time. Patrick went to collect his mom. They did not make it back in time. (boo!) Luckily I had time to find an alternative to the next train – at 1:30. The train station is Dublin is very near the bus station. Turns out there are buses to Dublin every hour. So at noon we boarded the bus. (yea!) Not quite as comfortable the train but better than hanging around for an 90 minutes and probably cheaper.

We got in and amazingly we are doors away from the hotel. (yea!) We used the ATM to get Sterling (remember, Belfast, new country, new currency); Patrick’s mom’s card was eaten by the machine. (boo!) For some reason Patrick thought the bank would retrieve the card. SO we had to go to the bank. (boo!) They don’t. (shocker) So we went to check into the hotel. (yea!)

None of us had eaten since breakfast. It was 4:00. But I had looked up a great restaurant near where Patrick had to do research. (yea!) The taxi driver had not heard of it. (boo!) So we ended up at a very OK pub for lunch. Patrick went to do research but ended up back within half an hour. Turns out his library closed at 4:15. (boo!) I had suggested he check the times of the library – but that had gone over about as well as me suggesting that the bank would not be retrieving the cash card.

Anyways the lunch was nice and was very near the Belfast Botanic Gardens – someplace I wanted to visit. (yea!) So we walked through. Most of the pictures are from there. It’s beautiful. It was raining but not too hard so we didn’t mind. Patrick, Irish Grandma and Aine headed back to the hotel. Lily, Kate and I trekked around town for almost an hour.

Fun Night

MY favorite thing about Belfast this time around was meeting up with my friend Sarah McCormack. Sarah is working on a movie in Belfast. She normally lives on an island off the coast. I have seen her in at least 15 years. She looks great. It was great to hear about how well things are going for her and the rest of her family. The good news is that I’ll be back in Ireland in January so we didn’t have to try to cram 15 years into a dinner; we’ll meet up again after the New Year.

Forgot to mention, I’m trying this new approach to pictures. We’ll see if I like it.

I have to say that the girls should win some kind of award because they were very good natured and pretty well behaved about going on the second black taxi tour. The adults had loved the first tour so much that we called up Jimmy a second time to see what else he could show us – and he didn’t disappoint. (If you’re ever in Belfast you should call Jimmy for a tour: 077 079 49 578.)

I’m going to try to post the pictures and then make comments on each picture or group of pictures. If it goes well I might go back to the earlier post to see if I can add more there too.

These pictures are from St Malachy’s. The ceiling is one of two of its kind in Europe. The other is in Rome. They closed the church on Monday for two years for renovations.

We took a tour of east Belfast, which is a predominantly Protestant area. I think these were the 2 Catholic murals that we saw on our tour.

The following are the Protestant murals that we saw. We heard that the Protestants got ₤5,000 (that’s $10,000) to take down bad mural and put up new ones. I’m not sure how they defined “bad”. There was a serious of 6 or so murals we saw that were created with a ₤100,000 grant.

What I found significant was that many of the Protestant murals that we saw on our previous tour were very pastoral – these were not. These were placed more often in current day and had more urgency to them – much like the Catholic murals that we saw a few days earlier.

I actually took more pictures, which you can see on Flickr.

Here are a couple of sporting murals. One is of George Best (big soccer player who died a couple of years ago) and one commemorates some soccer game win against England.
 

The next pictures are of Van Morrison’s house (where he grew up, he now lives in Killiney not too far from Cabinteely) and Ina Paisley’s house – really you can only see the lane, but there it is.

Finally, we have pictures from Stormont, the Parliment Buildings in Belfast.

After the Ulster Folk Museum, everyone else had a rest and I walked in horribly rainy-sleety weather to the Queen’s Quarter towards Queen’s College. There were a few nice secondhand shops and I enjoyed shopping – but I have to say the weather was ugly. It was fun to get a chance to walk around a bit. Belfast really is a lot more like London to me than like Dublin. The shops are shops I used to see in London, there’s less grass, and it just feels more like London.

Saturday evening we all went to eat at Deanes. It is a very nice restaurant and I have say that the wait staff was really nice about us showing up with 3 kids. In fairness we did phone ahead and we did come in early – 6:00. So we were leaving as most folks were arriving. ALso I have the say that aside from a lot of giggling the girls were very well behaved.

The food was amazing. It was the best fois gras I have ever had. And much to the delight of the girls I tried wood pigeon, which was good. (Not as good as fois gras, however.)

Saturday afternoon we headed about 10 miles out of Belfast to Cultra and the Ulster Folk Museum. It was cold. There was still a good amount of snow on the ground outside of the city center. We went through some nice parts of Belfast (Holywood) to get to the Folk Museum.

The Museum is like Fort Snelling back home in that it’s a reenactment of a town from 1900. You walk around the village and can walk through the various homes, businesses, churches, and public buildings. Apparently this place is packed in the summer. I can tell you it’s not packed on a cold, snowy Saturday in January – but we still enjoyed it.

While Patrick’s mom was clearly not a young girl in 1900, the girls were thrilled to hear that she had used many of the things that we saw in the cottages. She had made tea in a fireplace and she had used the lantern-type lamps.

There were chamber pots in the rooms of the poorer cottages and the girls though this was the funniest thing ever. (They took several pictures, which I will add below, for their cousins in Chicago.) The girls were sorely disappointed to hear that their Irish Grandma did not have a chamber pot as a kid.I nearly forgot about our fun conversation with the woman who worked at the shop in the Museum. She thought Dublin was the best place to visit. (Of course we thought Belfast was much more fun – proving that the grass is always greener.)

She grew up in Belfast and it was interesting to hear her talk about growing up in such a turbulent time. She said she was about 15 when the troubles really started (again) and so she had missed doing the stuff that most teenagers do – like going to the mall or dances or just hanging out. It kind of makes you think about the kids all over the world who have stilted childhoods because of turbulent times.

On Saturday morning we went to St George’s Market, which is very similar to the farmers market in St. Paul. There are lots of booths with food and various products. St George’s market is indoors – well not really indoors, but covered anyways. I think I saw a sign that said it was the largest covered marketing Europe. There was a band playing.

We each seemed to buy something but the real treat was our treats. We got chocolate marshmallow crepes. They were excellent! Aine got just marshmallow crepe, which isn’t that good.

Friday night Patrick and I went to a Burlesque Ball. It was part of a new-ish festival in Belfast called the Out to Lunch festival. Mostly it’s a serious of cheap, lunch time performances. Apparently they added a few night time shows this year – including the burlesque show.

It was fun – not too risqué. We tried to get pictures but with our camera we can take pictures in the dark or of things that are moving – not both. Plus we felt a little stalker-like with the camera.

Clearly we had to take a shot or two of the snow. It didn’t snow in Dublin so out timing, if we were missing snow, was perfect. This was the first snow in Belfast in 6 years, or so I heard. It snowed most of the night. I bet they had 3 inches of heavy snow by morning.

Unfortunately no one seems to have a shovel in Belfast. In fairness if I only needed one once every 6 years I wouldn’t have one either. So the walking was pretty treacherous – but we didn’t mind. It was a perfect morning to head into the W5 Children’s Museum.

The museum was great. The kids loved it. It was very reminiscent of the St Paul Children’s Museum – but there were a few new things. There was a science demonstration and Lily was picked as the helper – just as my sister Katie would have been chosen when we were kids.

I nearly forgot to mention the crabbiest lunch in history. We stayed too long at the W5 (forgot to mention that W5 stands for who, what, why, where, when). It was sleety and cold. We decided to eat at the historic Crown Bar. It is a nice bar – but it’s a bar. Patrick tried to order a beer, which he needed badly and they said no kids allowed. Quickly someone found us a nice little snug and in the end the food was good and it is very historic but it took a while for us to appreciate it. Sometimes we really just need a Champps, I guess.

Thursday afternoon we visited the Linen Hall Library. It’s more than 200 years old. Lily didn’t believe us about that at first – after all she pointed out, Minnesota is only 150 years old. It kind of put all of Europe versus the US in perspective.

Patrick found some gem for his research at the library. I enjoyed the “Belfaskating” art exhibit in the halls. You can see a couple of shots below. The pictures are hung in the stairwell. It makes a nice contrast to the rest of the library.

After the library Patrick, Kate and Aine went on “the big wheel” – a Ferris wheel they built near the City Hall. I was sad that the City Hall was closed during our visit. They are refurnishing it entirely. I think they said it would be done by 2009.

I learned that piece of info when Patrick and I talked to a woman from the Northern Ireland Tourism Bureau. We talked to her on assignment from the Irish Gazette. She was very interesting. She talked about the area’s confidence in the peace process today. How even a year ago no one would have guessed that on Monday 26 March 2007, the date of the British Government deadline for devolution or dissolution, Paisley would lead a DUP delegation to a meeting with a Sinn Féin delegation led by Gerry Adams which agreed on a DUP proposal that the executive would be established on May 8. Later in April, Paisley met in Dublin with Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and publicly shook his hand, something Paisley had refused to do until there was peace in Northern Ireland. (I got the dates et al from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Paisley.)

She also told us about the Titanic. The Titanic was built in Belfast; I don’t know if I mentioned that earlier. They didn’t make a big deal about it for the long time but apparently they are also building confidence to commemorate the building of the titanic. The centennial of the building is in 2012. You can read all about that on Wikipedia too http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanic.

We had dinner at the Europa, a hotel that was bombed 32 times in the past. It’s supposed to be a very nice hotel. But the service was nothing compared to the super friendly accommodating people at Jury’s. What was nice is that there are a lot of windows, which made it easy to watch the snow as it fell. It was like a snow globe!

OK my final post on the taxi blog. Here are the pictures from the shipyard where the Titanic was built. The centennial of the Titanic is 2012. They are working on a bunch of museums that should be done by 2009. Apparently is took more than 4000 people to build the Titanic.

The boat pictured was built alongside the Titanic. It was actually just taken out of commission in the 1960’s. The dam looking space is where the Titanic was built.